- What projects did you work on from Square?- Just Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.- Ah, wow.That was a groundbreaking piece.- It was groundbreaking.There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears,and a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor.(laughing)Though, everyone worked togetherand created a nice product.- That was really incredible.You look at the still images of that movie.They are stunning.

Absolutely stunning.But then, as soon as they started going into motion,that's where you ran into the problems,and I think a lot of folkshad a hard time getting past that.- Some of the technology made at Squarewent on to make their own products, like,I think, SciFlex, which is a clock solver,came out of Square.Also, some of the techniques andtextures for facial resolutionsof textures and whatnot came out of there,because there was a lot of care put into that,like pores, skin, tiny hairs.

- What did you transition to after that?- I ended up in Los Angeles and worked atDigital Domain for about four monthsdoing rendering, which I guess you cankind of take as a step down,if you have a "hierarchy" of artists and technicians,but it allowed me to get a firmer technical hold.- Really, you took what some folks wouldbe considered a demotion, but really, it wasalmost a way to sort of garner a new set of skillsas a render angler, which is an incrediblyimportant part of the process.

When we work on computers, that data hasto go somewhere, and it's the most importantpart of the process, is that data,because without it, there is no film,there's no commercial, there's no animation.- There's a lot of work behind the scenesand under the scenes making a movie.Whatever you see on the screen is notwhat came out of the artist's computer.There'll be dropped frames, there'll be assetsthat just disappear for no reason,so you need paint roto.

You need render anglers to put all that together,because the systems are just built by humansand we're imperfect, so the things we makeare going to be imperfect.- Did you find that, you know, once you werein that position, was it easy for you to sort ofmake the jump back into compositing?Or did you have to go back and proveyourself all over again?- I did kind of have to prove myself all over again.After Digital Domain, I went in Orange County,Southern California, for about six months,I was a graphic designer redoing medical forms.

- Oh, wow.- Yeah, it gets kind of rough sometimes.You just have to get the work where you can. (laughing)- Yeah.- And I would crank out that stuff.And after that, it was a long, hard slog.I think I hit the pavementfor a good, solid two months.If I remember right, my phone bill showedI called about 400 people.- Wow.As part of your job search?- As part of my job search, and this is beforereally widespread email, before everyonehad a website ready-to-go.

Just picked up the phone call."Hi, do you need any 3D people?"No.Okay."Hi, do you need any 3D people?"Can I show you my reel?""Hi, do you need any 3D people?"And I would ship out VHS tapes.There's a visual effects resource guide youcan get that has every production company,and all they do and their contact numbers and emails,and I just went from A to Z.- Wow.So it took you about two months, then,to land a new gig?- Eventually, Stargate, which has nothingto do with the TV show.

Stargate, a little visual effects place in,not Eagle Rock, in South Pasadena, picked me up,and I worked there for about a year,honing my skills.It was basically the setup where,"Here's a shot."We need smoke up front."Here are the plates."Go!"So you have to do your own match moving,you have to do your own modeling,you have to do your own effects,you have to do your own animation.

- So you're no longer part of a niche work flow?Now you're doing the whole thing?The whole shot top-to-bottom?- And it was six of us down in the trench.Like a literal trench.You would go downstairs, (laughing)and we were all just on a line. (laughing)We didn't have a render farm.If you wanted to render, you would take itto a machine in the corner.We had a small - did we have a rack?Yeah, we had a rack.We had a rack of machines, and you would log in.You would load your my scene.You would say render one to 100, step five.

Start rendering.Go to the next machine.This was really before the explosion ofrender farms like Cube, or Deadline,or whatever Pixar's free one is.- Well, there was a point at which the hardwarecost dropped down so much, and it was,you know, really after the turn of the millenniumwhen things really started to come down in pricewhere it became practical to actuallyhave a render farm, you know,and not be Pixar or Sony or any of the other big folks,and so I think that was really a groundbreakingtime because now, you know, small shops like thatcould really start to compete.

Did you see a dramatic turn in the levelof work that you guys were doing?- I think that happened whenI was at Tippett, actually.So after a year at Stargate, I kept talking to people,and a good friend from college, actually,Joseph Hamdorf, who's still at Tippett now. - Wow.I think he's been there for maybe 20 years.- Wow. That's incredible.- There's some niches for career people,but on the whole, like 90% of it,you're just bouncing from studio to studioand country to country, so they got my reeland called me up for an interview, and theyliked me, and I left Stargate to be a part ofthe crew working on the third Matrix movie.

- Fantastic.- So doing some smoke and whatnot,but it was a real change being part of a whole teamas opposed to doing my own thing, so I had to learnhow to be part of a pipeline pulling themodels here and pulling the animation here,and just work on my own little thing.- Did that, from a personality standpoint,so you, now, again, part of a team, and how was it,you know, making that transition from, you know,actually having to share your assets nowand you know, clean up after someone else's messor have them clean up after your mess,and, you know, that had to affectthe development process, too.

- Like working at Square, there were a lot ofseasoned industry people, a lot of pros,and it's really hard to make it in this industryif you're not a team player, if you're nota good communicator, so personality-wise,it was great.Tippett's probably one of the best places I'veever worked at, actually.I think about it fondly all the time.- What kind of shows were you working on?- Let's see.

There was Matrix Revolutions.There was Hell Boy, Constantine,Shaggy Dog, and actually,they were slowly grooming me.They were slowly advancing me,giving me more responsibility.Like in Shaggy Dog, I was the only effectsartist, and if you look at the credits,it says Clear Menser.- Wow.- I did get some help from other peopleon other shows, but I was the onedelivering the images.

- Wow, that's incredible.That's a lot of work for one person to take on.- It was about 40 shots, I think.Lots of fur.Lots of water.So, after being the sole effects guy on Shaggy Dog,I went to a lead in having three peopleand up to eight people under me for Enchanted,the Disney movie with Amy Adamsand they're in New York.

That was, I think, about half a dozen sequencesof about a dozen shots each. - Wow.And that got pretty hairy.- Yeah, I bet it did.- It's a lot of assets.A lot of feedback with the director,and we were actually the sole visual effects housefor that movie.- Wow.And that doesn't happen very much now.With movies nowadays, you look atthe end credits and there are...- This shot in this place, and this shot, and this shot, - Yeah, yeah- and this shot, and this shot.

- How is that, you know, some of that is dueto both budgetary pressures and the speedat which movies have to get done.The studios keep asking for shorter and shorterdeadlines, and they have to spread the workloadout across multiple shots.How do you, as a single v effects artist,you know, whether or not you're leading theteam or whether or not you're part of the team,you know, how do you, or maybe even do you,feel vested in the product at the endwhen you end up being a tiny cog in thisgigantic machine pushing this massive movie out?- That's a really good question.

Like, ownership of the shot by the artist,I feel, is just as good as having an artisanor craftsman who wants to make a beautiful product,so if the producers come in or the client comes inand starts changing a lot, kind of changingthe ground underneath you, it's hard to get attached,but Tippett had some really good producersthat would really fight for the artist and say,"I'm sorry, no, that's over budget.

"We can't make that change."- Wow.- But you don't always get producers like that.Sometimes, you'll get ones that just say yesto everything. -Right.- And that's a really dangerous thing to say yesto everything because then it sets up an unrealisticexpectation, you know, you started off in schoolas a classically trained artist, you like computers,making that kind of imagery, and you're acquired,you know, modeling skills, and texturing, and lighting,and rendering, along the way, so what would be the,like, what's next, like what's a thing thatyou're looking to develop and how do you go aboutdeveloping your new skills and still, you know,earn a living at the same time?- When you're at a really large studio,you can, like, help out another department.

Say you're effects TD, and you want to learncompositing, you can help roto a shot,or you can help crank outa bunch of repetitious stuff.You can basically be an assistant toanother department, but if you're a generalist,it's a little hard to break out.You basically have to do it on your own,at home, in your spare time.- Wow.- So weekends, basically.There's a lot of, what's the best way to put it,a lot of sacrifice necessary to branch outbecause your employer wants you to do your job.

They don't necessarily want you to learn other things.- Right.- But you do have larger studios, like ILM,or Pixar, that have additional learning.They want you to keep up with your art skills.They want you to animate.They want you to learn story telling.- Right, right.- One way you could do it is just go online.Digital tutors, or Lynda, or forums.Almost every piece of software has their ownindependent forum apart from the softwareplace itself.

- Right.- Me, personally?I'd like to go deeper into Houdini, looking atchops and then looking at rigging, as well.That seems to be one of the more mysteriousparts of Houdini.Like, there's actually a bunch of stuffabout rigging, like with muscles, and captureregions, it's just an effects package right now. -Yeah.- But it can do character stuff.

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Author

Updated

12/18/2015

Released

9/7/2014

Rob Garrott, lynda.com's video content manager, got the chance to sit down with nine influential artists to talk about their work, their inspirations, their tools, and the industry as a whole. The series kicks off with a conversation with Kris Pearn, storyboard artist for Sony Animation, and one of the people "drawing the movement" behind movies like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. We also include interviews with the following industry pros: